Chapter 15
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
DINARA
I wake with my mother’s terrified face burned into my vision and a name I’ve never heard before rattling around my skull.
Marina Voronina.
The dream was the same one I’ve had since the memories started surfacing. Six-year-old me peeking through my bedroom door in our Moscow apartment, watching two men with rough voices corner my mother in our narrow hallway.
But this time, it went further. My memory gave me something new.
One of the men spoke, his voice low and threatening: “Marina Voronina. You can’t run from who you are.”
I push myself upright, sheets tangled around my legs, pulse hammering in my throat.
Marina Voronina was not my mother’s name. Her name was Sonya Potapova, though that was her married name. Antonova was her maiden name.
There hasn’t been a dream or a flashback since I arrived in New York. Not one. It’s like the well dried up, leaving me to question whether the memories were ever real or fragments my brain constructed to make sense of my mother’s disappearance.
But this one had the same visceral quality as the others. The same texture of truth beneath the fear. One more layer of the onion peeled away by my subconscious, offering another clue I can’t ignore.
I throw off the covers, my skin clammy with sweat, and grab my phone. 6:13 a.m. I’ve only been asleep for a few hours.
After Kirill drove me home, I checked in with Oksana and made sure everyone was okay, which they were. Apparently, the story she heard was that a fight broke out in the bathroom. Sort of true.
After that, I got into bed, only to stare at the ceiling for what felt like hours.
I kept replaying the disastrous night. Marco’s hands on me, fighting him off myself. It was terrifying and I’m still sick about the whole thing.
But my brain keeps conjuring the image of Kirill with Rada on the dance floor, her body pressed against his, her palms on his chest. The jealousy that twisted through me was made worse by the fact that I had no right to feel it.
The night ended with him driving me home in icy silence, like touching me had been a mistake he regretted the second it was over.
Honestly, the man is giving me emotional whiplash. When I’m around him, my focus splinters. My carefully constructed walls crack. I feel things I have no business feeling for a man I’m using for information. Although, I haven’t successfully done that yet.
But now I have something new to go on. A name I didn’t have before. I don’t know if it’s her real name or an alias, but either way, it’s a starting point.
I stumble to my desk and wake my laptop. I’ve hidden everything important under layers of encryption, so it takes me a moment to pull up a browser and start routing through VPN servers in different countries to mask my location.
First stop is the Russian government archives. Birth certificates, identity records, anything official that might have “Voronin” attached to it. Voronina is the female form, but the patriarch would be Voronin.
A common enough Russian surname, though it’s not a name I’ve come across often.
The security on these databases is basic, the firewalls poorly maintained. I’m through in under five minutes.
I search for Marina Voronina, born between 1975 and 1985 in St. Petersburg and surrounding regions.
Nothing.
My mother’s birthday was May 15, 1982. At least, that’s what I always believed. But if she changed her name, she probably changed her birth date too, so best to be thorough.
I widen the parameters. 1970 to 1990. Then to all of Russia.
Still nothing.
I sit back and crack my knuckles, forcing myself to think, pulling my robe tighter around me.
If Marina existed and there’s no record of her in the standard databases, that means someone with significant power scrubbed her from the system. The kind that belongs to organized crime.
I need to go deeper.
I pull up the FSB’s classified intelligence network—Russia’s Federal Security Service. It’s harder to access than the government archives. Russian intelligence doesn’t fuck around with cybersecurity, but there’s always a vulnerability if you know where to look.
It takes me forty-five minutes to find a backdoor through their contractor network—a third-party IT company that handles file transfers and has outdated security protocols. I route through their system and into the FSB database.
My pulse speeds up. I have maybe three minutes before automatic security detects the intrusion so I need to work fast. I search for the surname Voronin.
It takes less than a second for the name to bring up a hit. Aleksandr Voronin, head of the Voronin Syndicate.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
Files populate with decades of surveillance, intelligence reports, suspected criminal activities. I download everything I can, grabbing documents at random, racing against the clock ticking in my head.
Two minutes. One minute. Thirty seconds.
I pull out as the system locks down behind me, severing my connection and triggering alerts that will have analysts scrambling to trace the intrusion.
They won’t find me. I covered my tracks well. But my hands are shaking as I open the files I managed to download.
Most are heavily redacted intelligence reports, but there’s one dossier that has more detail.
VORONIN SYNDICATE
Base of Operations: St. Petersburg, Russian Federation
Primary Operations: [REDACTED], weapons trafficking, [REDACTED], criminal enterprise.
Leadership: Aleksandr Voronin (deceased; car bomb killed his wife as well)
Status: Defunct. Organization no longer active.
Family Members: Svetlana Voronina (wife, deceased), Marina Voronina (daughter, deceased at 19. Drowning accident, body never recovered).
I stare at the screen, trying to process the possibility that my mother came from a now-defunct bratva family based in St. Petersburg. But according to this file, Marina drowned at nineteen, a few years before I was born.
I scroll down, looking for more information. Most of it is heavily redacted with black bars covering operational details, names of associates, specifics about their criminal activities. But one line catches my attention:
At the bottom of the dossier, there’s a link to attached surveillance materials. The first image loads slowly. Black and white, grainy, taken from a distance with a telephoto lens. A man in an expensive coat stepping out of a black Mercedes, flanked by two enforcers. His face is brutal and cold.
The caption reads: Aleksandr Voronin, suspected leader, Voronin Syndicate.
My heart speeds up. If this is my mother’s family, this man would be my grandfather.
The second photo opens. Aleksandr Voronin at an outdoor gathering, maybe a wedding or major celebration. There’s a woman beside him in a wrap dress, elegant and composed. And next to her, a teenage girl with blonde hair, wearing a formal dress and looking profoundly miserable.
I zoom in on the girl’s face. Wide-set eyes, full lips, a straight nose—it’s the same face I see in the mirror every morning.
Tears spring to my eyes and fall freely. This is my mother. The woman she was before she became Sonya, before she married my father, before she had me.
I’m looking at my grandmother. My grandfather. People I’ll never know. The tears come harder. Relief that I’m not crazy, that the dreams led me to the right place. But there’s so much that doesn’t make sense.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes and try to remember what I know about my mother’s past. My father told me she came from a wealthy, well-connected family in St. Petersburg. That they disowned her when she refused to play the part of a rich girl, waiting for a husband.
She moved to Moscow on her own without a penny to her name, sang in a jazz club to make ends meet before she met and married Papa, a working-class boxing instructor. She never spoke to her family again.
Did she stage her death and run away? Was she fleeing from her family? Were they terrible? Violent?
Or maybe they helped her escape. Maybe they faked her death to protect her from something, the world of violence and danger she was born into.
I don’t know. There are too many possibilities, too many blanks I can’t fill in.
But I do know the Voronin Syndicate is no longer active. They must have dissolved without a clear successor, maybe absorbed or destroyed by rivals. I’ll need to cross-reference intelligence databases, pull archived surveillance reports, even hack into old FSB case files if I can find a way in.
I have my work cut out for me.
I pull my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around myself. Why would the daughter of a powerful pakhan be trafficked? Was it punishment against her or her family? Revenge for something that went wrong between the Voronins and a rival? Worse, was it possible they were in on it all?
I close the laptop and sit in the growing dawn light.
Here’s what I know for certain: the Voronins and the Kupola Network are gone, but the Baronovs remain.
And Ruslan Baronov ran Velour, the club that auctioned off trafficked women, during the years my mother disappeared. He must know something, and I’ll do whatever it takes to get that information.
I push myself off the couch and head to the kitchen, filling the kettle. I have a shift at Velour tonight. Every night is a chance to learn something.
I need to stay focused. Keep my walls up. Remember why I’m here.
And stay the hell away from Kirill Baronov.